Prepare ahead of time. Short of using an elastic load balancing service, predict when you may have traffic spikes, and choose a cheap-to-implement solution such as request-level load balancing.
Create replicas of your web server processes on different machines for the duration you expect a potential traffic spike. Use a fast dispatcher like nginx[0] as a reverse proxy to load-balance requests to the appropriate replica web server machine.
If you see consistently low traffic, spin down the replicas and remove them from your load balancer configuration.
Create replicas of your web server processes on different machines for the duration you expect a potential traffic spike. Use a fast dispatcher like nginx[0] as a reverse proxy to load-balance requests to the appropriate replica web server machine.
If you see consistently low traffic, spin down the replicas and remove them from your load balancer configuration.
[0] http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/load_balancing.html